How bout New Jersey, 9% top end. I own a business here and I am dying to leave. My wife and I are battling it out. I can’t stand paying the pensions of slacker state workers. 25 years with the state and they are handed essentially 2,000,000 in pension benefits for life. I know a retired Fed and state worker collecting nearly $115,000 in 2 pensions and SS for life!
He was a lousy worker and should have been fired.
Get ready they will pass a law limiting your movement from one state to another! New Yorkers are already commuting from PA at 3% income tax.
“Get ready they will pass a law limiting your movement from one state to another!”
All socialist governments must control the movement of people, even if the laws are national and uniform from region to region.
The Chinese, even today, have the “hukou” system, and you must have everything registered and licensed in the place where you were origianlly assigned. To change your “hukou” to another city or province is purposely a very difficult, time-consuming, and expensive, and discouraging procedure.
Such is going to be established in the USA before long.
You refer to no less than a central plank of the Communist Manifesto: See #4 below. For emigres leaving the country, it was checked-off last Summer with the Orwellian-named “Heroes Earnings Assistance and Relief Tax Act of 2008” which imposes heavily confiscatory taxes. It’s a small leap from there to doing the same thing for folks exiting a state or locality rather than the country. Then there’s the progressive income tax, which is what Bloomberg is talking about. Contrary to DemocRat catechism grew more heavily progressive under Bush (e.g., the top 5% of earners in 2006 paid 60.14% of Federal income taxes, up from 57.13% in 2004, cf. http://www.ntu.org/main/page.php?PageID=6). Just go down the list, you’ll see:
http://www.anu.edu.au/polsci/marx/classics/manifesto.html
Karl Marx and Frederick Engels
Manifesto of the Communist Party
1848
“...We have seen above that the first step in the revolution by the working class is to raise the proletariat to the position of ruling class to win the battle of democracy.
The proletariat will use its political supremacy to wrest, by degree, all capital from the bourgeoisie, to centralize all instruments of production in the hands of the state, i.e., of the proletariat organized as the ruling class; and to increase the total productive forces as rapidly as possible....
1. Abolition of property in land and application of all rents of land to public purposes.
2. A heavy progressive or graduated income tax.
3. Abolition of all rights of inheritance.
4. Confiscation of the property of all emigrants and rebels.
5. Centralization of credit in the banks of the state, by means of a national bank with state capital and an exclusive monopoly.
6. Centralization of the means of communication and transport in the hands of the state.
7. Extension of factories and instruments of production owned by the state; the bringing into cultivation of waste lands, and the improvement of the soil generally in accordance with a common plan.
8. Equal obligation of all to work. Establishment of industrial armies, especially for agriculture.
9. Combination of agriculture with manufacturing industries; gradual abolition of all the distinction between town and country by a more equable distribution of the populace over the country.
10. Free education for all children in public schools. Abolition of children’s factory labor in its present form. Combination of education with industrial production, etc.”